Ndidi Onukwulu and Seun Kuti at the Commodore Ballroom

The Vancouver International Jazz Festival was raging throughout the week that I spent north of the border, featuring hundreds of local and world artists in dozens of venues around the city. During that week, you could pretty much duck into any downtown live-music bar at night and be likely to see and hear something interesting and worthwhile which you'd never seen or heard before.

Last Wednesday night I ended up at the Commodore Ballroom, on the bustling nightlife strip of Granville Street where clubs and pubs, cafes and music stores, noodle shops and sex shops, operate side-by-side in apparent harmony. As the name suggests, the Commodore is essentially a cavernous room with a generous stage up front and a large wooden dance floor in the center, flanked on two sides by tiered tables and, amazingly, three full bars. There were two sets on the ticket that night: first, burgeoning local chanteuse Ndidi Onukwulu [pictured] with her versatile trio; and second, son of iconic Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and heir apparent to the musical-political lineage, Seun Kuti, accompanied by Fela's Egypt 80. Both groups put on powerful, inspired performances.

Ndidi Onukwulu started things off and got the crowd going with her electrifying bluesy vocals and her uniquely quirky, folksy, eclectic style of songwriting. Glittering in a black sequin dress with a poofy high-waisted knee-length skirt, she cheerfully declared to a smilingly appreciative audience: "All of my songs are about heartbreak, heartache, death, and world destruction. I'll adhere strictly to these four themes. Heartbreak, heartache, death, and world destruction." Canadian daughter of a Nigerian father and German mother, Onukwulu has just released her second CD, titled "The Contradictor", which she says is partially inspired by cemeteries she visited around the country. She says, "You can learn a lot in cemeteries. They are almost like chat rooms for dead people." Hmm. I guess that's kinda cool. Less cryptically, she adds, "The blues is my soul. That’s where I come from. But I was never a self-proclaimed blues artist. When I think of what I’m doing today, it’s organic music that steps outside of any boundaries. I embrace the idea of cabaret. There’s an excess of emotion, almost to a comical point."

As for Seun Kuti, well, some background:

“I know who I am. Even if I sell 100 million copies of my album, even if I tour the world six times, even if I win 70 Grammys, people will be talking about my dad. There's no escaping it,” says the younger Kuti, who has even adopted his father's second Yoruban name of Anikulapo (“I've got death in my quiver”) and references the legacy upon which he is building with his self-titled debut, “Seun Kuti & Fela's Egypt 80.”

After years of singing and performing his late father's songs, Kuti, who comes to World Caf Live in Philadelphia on Saturday, has issued his own incendiary collection of politically pointed oeuvres that swing with all the brash militancy and invigorating dance rhythms of his father's hallmark sound. “Seun Kuti,” released last week on Disorient Records, is an explosive attack on the corruption, ignorance, maladies and other ills ravaging contemporary Africa, the music a pressing and vibrant horn-saturated blend that brims with inventive guitars, keyboards, percussion and vocals.

That Egypt 80 is comprised of more than two-thirds of its original members, who for years played nightly at the Shrine nightclub at Fela's Kalakuta commune in Lagos, Nigeria, keeps much of the band's original sound in tact — the gritty funk-jazz fusion steeped in traditional African rhythms and chants that was pioneered by the elder Kuti.

And while his youngest son asserts that he is very much an individual, he is determined to maintain a certain degree of purity when it comes to preserving the kinetic big-band formula.

“Afrobeat is what I want to do. I don't believe it has to sound like any other genres. They want to put hip-hop, soul, samba, Latin music to try to make it modern. I say Afrobeat is already modern,” says Kuti, who speaks, as he sings, with a muscular urgency. “Afrobeat is the future. All these other genres need to put Afrobeat into the music.”

Although he acknowledges a love for hip-hop, which along with rap, has gained sway over the Nigerian music scene in recent years, he is not a fan of much of what he hears in his homeland.

“In Africa today, the establishment supports hip-hop because the kind of hip-hop they do in Africa today is very ... it's light, it doesn't teach you anything. It's ignorant hip-hop that talks about rubbish,” he says. “But it's what the establishment pushes. It is not a big threat to them, not opposition, not asking questions; it keeps people in the box they want them to be (in).

“Hip-hop doesn't have a wider audience; it has a bigger commercial support. But Afrobeat, with or without support, will still carry on living because it's the truth.

“Afrobeat is not a kind of music you just perform. It's the kind of music you have to believe in. It's a movement that takes over your life and it's a personal movement as well.”

And so along with a musical legacy, Kuti has also inherited his father's defiant outspokenness and inflammatory politics. “Many Things,” from his debut disc, lambastes governmental hypocrisy and the empty promises made by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, even including an excerpt from one of his speeches, while “Mosquito Song” decries the inexcusable prevalence of malaria due to corruption.

It was an amazing time at the Commodore. By the end of the night, chairs had largely been abandoned, the crowd was on its feet, dancing, sweating. And that makes the subversive political message even more dangerous.

Comments

[nezua]

i loved the whole post. but "The Contradictor" is awesome. and I've got death in my quiver, damn. that one made me want to redo my blog's tagline like i can't even TELL ya.

sounds like a great time.

[Kai]

Yup, it's great stuff, all of it. I've got death in my quiver is deep.

[Changeseeker]

I'd never heard of either of these artists, Kai, and they're both awesome. Kuti is making love to the audience in the video. OMG and whew...

[Kai]

Changeseeker, yes they are both tremendous artists. Hehe, yeah I guess Kuti does have a certain way with the crowd, doesn't he? Like his father, he's considered a major sex symbol. When I saw him, he was wearing a slick silk shirt with big lapels, which of course came off during the encore.